A friend shared this with me earlier and I was surprised not to find any reference to it around here - so allow me to kick-off the discussion.
Yo Chris Mooney, Greenwald would make for one heck of an interview.

As the Justice Department prepares to file charges against Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden for leaking classified documents about the National Security Agency, the role of private intelligence firms has entered the national spotlight. Despite being on the job as a contract worker inside the NSA’s Hawaii office for less than three months, Snowden claimed he had power to spy on almost anyone in the country. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email,” Snowden told The Guardian newspaper. Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector. Former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a quote “digital Blackwater.” We speak to Tim Shorrock, author of the book “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.”

Speaking from Hong Kong where he broke the story of Edward Snowden outing himself as the NSA whistleblower, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald joins us to discuss Snowden’s actions and the multiple disclosures he’s revealed about government surveillance. “There is this massive surveillance apparatus being gradually constructed in the United States that already has extremely invasive capabilities to monitor and store the communications and other forms of behavior not just of tens of millions of Americans, but of hundreds of millions, probably billions of people, around the globe,” Greenwald says. “It’s one thing to say that we want the U.S. government to have these capabilities. It’s another thing to allow this to be assembled without any public knowledge, without any public debate, and with no real accountability. What ultimately drove [Snowden] forward — and what ultimately is driving our reporting — is the need for a light to be shined on what this incredibly consequential [surveillance] world is all about and the impact it’s having both on our country and our planet.”

As Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warns the recent leaks could “render great damage to our intelligence capabilities,” we speak to William Binney, a former top official at the National Security Agency, and Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has broken the NSA spying stories. Binney spent almost 40 years at the agency but resigned after Sept. 11 over concerns about growing domestic surveillance. He spent time as director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. “The government is not trying to protect [secrets about NSA surveillance] from the terrorists,” Binney says. “It’s trying to protect knowledge of that program from the citizens of the United States.”

My friend does research and has a web page on Taiwan and China.
He was able to see who visited the web page, what they looked at and what they copied.
China visited his website once a month. Some Central Bank around the world were regular visitors.
The NSA visited once a week and copied the whole website.

The stuff is all about trade and banking. You would go there if you were thinking about doing business in China.

A month ago this service of seeing who visited was no longer available to him.
They told him that the government did not want him to be able to see who was visiting his website and not just him. This happened to all website.

A month ago this service of seeing who visited was no longer available to him.
They told him that the government did not want him to be able to see who was visiting his website and not just him. This happened to all website.

No, not really.
He still gets reports of how many visitors he had. But he wanted to know who they were. Like when the central banks would visit he knew that they had read information in a trade source and went to his website for more information. And he knew by where they searched what their interests were. He also is an expert on unpaid debt. China has a lot of bonds sold to American’s years ago that have never been paid. The website company did not name the NSA, but we feel they must be the one’s behind the blocking.